Visual drama

Drama? What is that? When I looked out of the window of a aircraft flying low over the Alps the contrast of the darkness of space above and the bright snow below was clearly dramatic. I think most people agree with me about that.

Beijing’s famous National Center for the Performing Arts by the French architect Paul Andreu is built for drama. Even on a smoggy morning a decade ago it looked dramatic. There’s no question about it in my mind. But I can’t speak for others, of course.

Mumbai’s trans-harbour link was inaugurated on Saturday. On Sunday we took it to meet friends for lunch near Pune. It cuts travel time dramatically, by almost a third. But coming back to Mumbai we were treated to an unusual sight: a stiff wind had blown away most of the haze around the city, so we saw Mumbai glowing in the golden hour. I’m sure this kind of view will become iconic in the coming years. First Niece thinks it looks AI generated. That probably means I captured the drama.

At the end of this year’s monsoon I was feeling the lack of outings to the Sahyadris. So when we visited the Kaas plateau right at the end of the season, the sight of raindrops on flowers meant a lot to me. Here I tried to use the flower of a Smithia hirsuta to provide a background to the droplets of water. Is it dramatic? To my eyes it is. But what do you think?

On the banks of a high lake in the Himalayas, some one had the stamina to move large rocks around and balance them in the form of tall spires. The morning’s sunlight on the lake and the dark stone cairns made a striking composition. But is it dramatic? I can’t decide.

It was certainly a dramatic sight when I pulled into a parking lot in Seattle and saw a 1967 Chevelle parked in front of me. It’s not particularly rare, but still, that beautiful classic could cost almost a hundred thousand US dollars. I took several photos, but I think this one looks the best. Have I shown the drama of seeing a car like this in a random parking lot? I’m not sure. I need your help on this.

A decade of midsummer

Where have I been during midsummer in the last decade? I thought I would look at my photos to jog my memory. I don’t have photos from the solstice on every year. For example, the last photo I took this year was a week ago in Mumbai; that’s the featured photo. So I just put together a photo selected from June each year, as close as I could get to the solstice.

2017: Granada (Alhambra)

2016: Frascati

2015: Beijing (Lama temple)

2014: the stratosphere

2013: Mumbai

2012: Thane (railway station)

2011: Paris (the Eiffel tower)

2010: Germany (countryside)

2009: Mumbai

A disappointing art space

I first came across contemporary Chinese art in an exhibition at the Luxembourg Garden in Paris many years ago. The sculptures and images were riveting: not at all the classical brushwork that I’d known before. So I was very keen to visit the Factory 798 art zone in Beijing.

It was a little disappointing. It is huge, and there are striking works which you come across (I’ve blogged about some of these here), but the place as a whole is a strip mall for the arts and fashion. An example of the gentrification was the exhibition called "Miss Dior" a publicity event by Dior in a space called the Ullens Center for Contemporary Arts. The photo above is of the centerpiece: a kitschy installation made with Miss Dior bottles.

I’m sure that by now young new artists have found a cheaper place to work in.

Beijing finds

I’ve now managed to catch up with work, more or less. At least I have the time to go through last month’s photos: deleting and tagging. Here is one I did not post earlier. The National Center for the Performing Arts is near the southwest exit of the Tian’anmen West subway station. The morning was hazy and smoggy when I took this photo, but the building still shines: like a blob of mercury.

The last days of the empire

We walked through the Summer Palace in Beijing on a very hot day. The leafy roads were protected from the hot sun. The cooling breeze from the Kunming lake gave respite from the heat. In spite of the crush of people you saw immediately on entering palace gates, the rest of the huge grounds did not seem crowded. We walked through the corridors of the palace of the Empress Dowager Longyu. She was married to the emperor when Chinese empire was already crumbling. She brought the two thousand year history of the Middle Kingdom to an end by signing the instrument of abdication in 1912 on behalf of the child emperor Puyi. China burned through the next century. It is only now that you see a new society being born.

If you know the outlines of the history of those troubled times you feel odd walking through these peaceful leafy corridors. The country was already torn apart when these halls were being refurbished for the Emperor’s consort. The European powers had burned and looted the Summer Palace twice, the Boxer rebellion had occupied it, China had lost battles to Japan. But the opulence of the palace of the last empress did not reflect this. You walk through the corridors as an exquisitely painted cat turns its back on you in contented peace from its place in the rafters, forever seeking mice in the gables. Chinese tourists walk past, cameras clicking on simulated auto.

Beijing fathers

Beijing seems to have many fathers actively doing their part in bringing up children. Here are two who are involved in taking care of their child while the wife takes the grandparents into a temple to pray. It is impossible to compose the photo when you take shots like this, because you do not want to distract the people from what they are already doing. As you can see, both fathers noticed me.

What China has more than any other country in the world is people, and it pays as a tourist to concentrate on them.

Pollution alert

These are three successive attempts to take close ups of architectural details in Beijing’s Lama Temple. I never thought that the amount of incense burnt in a temple could possibly drive me out choking and coughing, but eventually it did. Before that I did get a few decent shots when occasionally the smoke would let off.

Ming Buddhas

In the National Museum in Beijing I saw these three beautiful statues of serene Buddhas from the Ming period. The symbiosis of Buddhism and ceramics has to be seen to be believed. I was especially impressed by the large and colourful porcelain Buddha (photo below), whose buffed surface looked like any of the decorative Ming vases in an adjoining hall. If it were not for the serenity radiating from the face and fingers of the right hand held in the Karana mudra, warding off evil, I would have had a tough time guessing who this represented.

We nearly did not go to the museum; three weeks is not a long time in Beijing if you are also in meetings most of the time. The museum is not billed as one of the must-sees. After our visit we thought it is unfairly neglected. In any other city it would be one of the star sights.

The immense building has eight large exhibition halls on each of its four floors, and more in the basement. We knew we didn’t have time to see everything, so our list of priorities was based on an abstract idea of classical Chinese art: ceramics, paintings, statues and jade. Each of these collections was enormous. We missed much, and we plan to visit the museum again when we come back to Beijing.

Authenticity and hutongs

The question of authenticity strikes me every time I walk through a hutong recommended by a guide book. These are, without exception, hutongs which have been converted into food and bar streets. They are crowded with Chinese youth and tourists. Nothing remains of the original hutongs. Those are full of local life, children playing in the streets, older people sitting around, men and women going about their daily life, chatting. The repurposed hutongs are dissociated from the life of the city, and look like a bar street anywhere else in the world, sometimes glitzy, sometimes sleazy, like the photo above.

They satisfy a notion of conservation according to which authenticity resides in the material. The notion that change in usage can render the neighbourhood inauthentic does not strike the self-congratulatory guidebooks.

Modern Chinese Sculpture

The Chinese art scene is red hot. In the last decade there have been influential shows of Chinese contemporary art around the world. This art is being bought locally and supported by the government, most visibly in the form of public art commissioned by municipal governments.

I found that contemporary Chinese painting has to negotiate a tightrope. On the one hand it may fail by giving up an unique Chinese visual sensibility and merge into a western contemporary movement. On the other, the Chinese visual history may overwhelm any attempt to modernize. In walking through Shanghai’s M50 or Beijing’s 798 art districts we did not see a single ink drawing showing cars, buses, or cities. There was, however, a very clever calligraphic take on Mondrian.

I find that the cleverest and the most innovative work is being done by sculptors. Three random works which caught my eye are pictured above. These are not, by any means, the most influential works of Chinese sculpture. The first is an edgy representation of a (pink!) spider, the second a clever take on bonsai, the third a quirky quote of classical Greek sculpture. Perhaps the freedom to explore is related to the fact that Chinese sculpture carries less of a cultural load than painting or ceramics.